A Barcelona businessman and industrial chemist, as well as a photographer. Over several decades of the twentieth century he built a body of work attentive to the port of Barcelona, the Catalan coast and inland landscapes of Catalonia. A substantial part of that production remained unpublished until 2020, when approximately 4,000 negatives were located in Mallorca and identified as the work of Joaquín Tusquets de Cabirol. They were subsequently incorporated into the collections of the Museu Marítim de Barcelona.
Origins
Born in Barcelona in 1904. He trained as a chemist and practised the profession. Other parts of his life remain to be researched.
The photography
Tusquets de Cabirol photographed steadily outside the professional circuit. The images that survive are the work of someone formally educated in the medium — alert to composition, attentive to Mediterranean light, capable of sustaining a personal project across decades without any external pressure to deliver.
Subjects
Three subjects hold the work together. The first, and the largest, is the port of Barcelona: dockworkers, ships, infrastructure, and the daily life of the quay in the central decades of the century. The second is the Catalan coast — landscape, and the fishing trades along it. The third is the interior of Catalonia, which completes a kind of visual geography of the region.
Rediscovery
He died in Barcelona in 1979. His family valued and preserved his photographic work for many years. Years later, approximately 4,000 negatives were located in Mallorca. They had been taken from the family home in Barcelona and transferred there without the family’s knowledge or consent. Following an investigation, they were identified as the work of Joaquín Tusquets de Cabirol and incorporated into the collections of the Museu Marítim de Barcelona, which in 2021 mounted an exhibition devoted to his work, Imágenes encontradas. La Barcelona marítima de posguerra. El fondo Joaquín Tusquets de Cabirol (“Found Images. Maritime Barcelona in the Postwar Years”).
In 2026, Fundación MAPFRE presents La forma elocuente ("The Eloquent Form") at KBr Barcelona Photo Center, in collaboration with Fundación Photographic Social Vision — the first substantial retrospective. His arrival into the canon of twentieth-century Catalan photography is part of a broader pattern: non-professional bodies of work, made outside the official circuits, returning to public view.
